My personal, uneducated guess about mental illness in general is that it's a systemic issue, having to do with a person's overall health (genetic + lifestyle/en

My personal, uneducated guess about mental illness in general is that it's a systemic issue, having to do with a person's overall health (genetic + lifestyle/environment). Systemic issues are likely hard to research, and so we take this scienctific (method) approach of studying small bits in isolation. This is similar to food science - there are too many factors to clearly study how we get nutrients from our food, and so science has studied bits in isolation (vitamin c, vs "orange juice with pulp and eggs"). My hope is that we'll find ways to study the overall health/status of an individual and see how that all adds up to behavior we deem "unhealthy", rather than being "trapped" poking at minute details (or perhaps well finally get enough detail to see the bigger picture). Anyway I have zero expertise in this, but this is my guess on the situation.